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I think it's fair to assume that, in this context, people are using the 'median' sense of average rather than the 'mean' sense. When someone thinks "I am a bett
by nudge 16y ago
I think it's fair to assume that, in this context, people are using the 'median' sense of average rather than the 'mean' sense. When someone thinks "I am a better driver than average", this probably means "If you were to rank all drivers by skill, I would be in the top half" rather than "If you take the mean of the quantified driving skill of all drivers, my quantified driving skill is above that."
- HilbertSpace 16y ago"I think it's fair to assume that, in this context, people are using the 'median' sense of average rather than the 'mean' sense." Not "fair" at all, and not at all appropriate. Still want the average, the mean, the expectation because of the law of large numbers and the best L^2 approximation property of the mean. Besides, often in practice, e.g., for even positive integer n independent, identically distributed samples from a distribution absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, the median is not even well defined. The median is good for politically correct news stories about data from political economics.
- nudge 16y agoNobody's talking about which is the better average. I was merely suggesting that this is how you can interpret the quote in a way that escapes your attempt to show how it is incorrect.
- HilbertSpace 16y ago"I was merely suggesting" No, as is clear on the screen in front of you, you wrote "I think it's fair to assume" No it's not "fair to assume" that.
- shasta 16y agoI say the point goes to HilbertSpace here. I think Nudge wasn't merely suggesting that there's another way to interpret the quote, but was rather suggesting that was the intended way to interpret the quote. Of course, Nudge was right about that.